Thursday, 28 January 2010

What The Hell Is Wrong With Leicestershire..?

A terrified woman made two 999 calls before she was battered to death, but police were too busy to respond, a damning report said yesterday.

And it gets better:

Joanne Butler, who had mental problems, was attacked by her neighbour Sean Wilson and his 13-year-old son, who described her as the 'psycho woman' in the flat above.

They used a sock filled with rocks to beat her about the head before butchering her with an axe.

Savour the irony there for a second…

The police force involved, Leicestershire, was the same one criticised last year after its officers missed dozens of opportunities to tackle yobs who drove Fiona Pilkington to kill herself and her teenage daughter.

Is the place under some kind of curse? Is this town built on an ancient burial site, or something?

Just when you think things couldn’t get any worse for the police, this was disclosed:

Yesterday's report also revealed that Wilson also called 999 within minutes of his victim. Wilson, a labourer, was told to call back later if he was still having problems with the woman.

Well, great advice, chaps, but no need to rush or anything, he already took care of it…

Now, it does seem that the police do spend an awful amount of time sorting out the problems of the underclass, as any glance at the police blogs will tell you. But there’s irritating, and there’s downright dangerous, and it shouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to tell you which category this fell into:

Police had dealt with Miss Butler 20 times in the ten months before she died. Wilson, now 41, was also known to them as a violent alcoholic who once held a hacksaw to his exwife's throat.

So you’d expect them to respond with something resembling alacrity, wouldn’t you, lack of resources or not?

13 comments:

Anonymous
said...

It is most unfair, criticisingthe Police and Authorities fortheir abject failure to deal withthe numerous incidents of violenceand murder when their resources arestretched to the limit backing upHealth Inspectors looking forold men smoking pipes in British Legion toilets.They cant be everywhere,can thet ?

One of my key functions is to make the public more aware of our health and safety responsibilities. We will only permit young officers to progress towards dealing with real crime in safe stages.

Our present policy is to gain practical experience with 90 year old drivers who can be thrown to the ground on the slightest pretext and beaten to pulp without posing any serious return risk to our trainees.

The police sometimes provide a terrible service and they also make egregious errors from time to time - though who doesn't, I suppose - but (declaration of interest) having published three books by rank and file officers, I'd say that most of those at the lower end of the forces are as horrified at this sort of thing as the rest of us.

I don't suppose any of us know the full facts, but I remember how shocked people were by the opening passage of Wasting Police Time.

PC Copperfield, writing (as is now known) about Burton on Trent, revealed how he turned up on parade and was the only response PC on duty that morning, covering a town of 60,000 people.

This was unusual, but it wasn't unusual for there to be only four PCs on duty.

Given that Earl Shilton is a lot smaller than Burton, I guess it's not hard to imagine that there might only have been one or two cops on duty and that they therefore might easily have been too busy to attend (they didn't know how things were going to develop, and we don't know what else they were dealing with).

This doesn't excuse Leicestershire Police, or the Home Office (who really need to explain why there are only four uniformed cops available at any one time in a busy, violent town like Burton, when the actual police strength for the town is much, much higher, and why does it take so long for them to process arrests), but it may excuse the individual bobbies.

Re Leicestershire, it is in parts beautiful - the villages around Market Harborough and over into the vale of Belvoir particularly.Earl Shilton isn't quite in that league!

Staffs Police later denied that this - i.e. Copperfield have once been the only cop in town - had ever happened, though when we pointed out that we had evidence which proved it, and that it had happened more than once, they decided to leave it.

"...I'd say that most of those at the lower end of the forces are as horrified at this sort of thing as the rest of us."

That accounts for the number of police who have moved abroad, I expect...

"Staffs Police later denied that this - i.e. Copperfield have once been the only cop in town - had ever happened, though when we pointed out that we had evidence which proved it, and that it had happened more than once, they decided to leave it."

Typical of state bureacracy everywhere - lie with impunity, because when you are found out, nothing happens to you.